Gavin Newsom’s High-Speed Gift to Republicans

California’s $77 billion bullet-train project from San Francisco to Los Angeles was supposed to be a proof of concept at a national level—proof that high-speed rail could actually work, providing an eco-friendly alternative to cars and planes here the way it does in Europe and Asia, and also proof that America could still build big things. And the project’s initial phase, a 119-mile stretch now being built through the state’s sparsely populated Central Valley, was supposed to be a proof of concept for the project itself.

But on Tuesday, the project became proof of something else: That it’s hard to build big complicated infrastructure projects in America’s fast-turnover political culture, even a green project in America’s greenest state.

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In his State of the State address, Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom suspended the decade-long effort to connect San Francisco in Northern California to L.A. in the south, saying the megaproject “would cost too much and take too long.” At the same time, he vowed to complete the Central Valley segment linking the struggling farm communities of Bakersfield and Merced—California’s ninth-largest and 100th-largest cities, respectively—as a standalone project, even though he admitted critics will call it a “train to nowhere.”

It’s hard to imagine a worse advertisement for high-speed rail: an orphaned line in a depressed area that will still cost billions of dollars, but won’t connect anyone to the vibrant population centers they need to reach. It’s also hard to imagine a worse advertisement for the Green New Deal for the climate that’s all the rage in Washington. Just days after Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s office floated a now-withdrawn document suggesting the Green New Deal should include a high-speed network vast enough to render airplanes obsolete, a progressive Democrat in a progressive state just rolled back America’s first big effort to replicate the bullet trains flourishing around the world.

Washington Republicans have been fighting high-speed rail in California and around the country as a Big Government boondoggle, and yesterday they gleefully declared victory. “The train to nowhere is finally stopped,” said House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who actually lives in Bakersfield. The next time Democrats push high-speed rail—or for that matter a Green New Deal—their Republican critics will get to remind them what Newsom had to say about California’s national model in his own State of the State: “Let’s get real.”

Part of Newsom’s decision was state-level politics. After serving as lieutenant governor to Jerry Brown, who repeatedly protected high-speed rail from bipartisan efforts to scuttle it in the state Legislature, the ambitious Newsom was eager to demonstrate his independence from his predecessors. The project was originally launched by yet another governor, Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger, so Newsom was signaling a new day in Sacramento.

At the same time, Newsom may have written the final chapter in a painful national story for Democrats, providing one last disappointment for the star-crossed high-speed rail program launched by President Barack Obama and his train-loving vice president, Joe Biden. Obama’s 2009 stimulus included $8 billion for high-speed rail projects, and in 2011, Biden announced a $53 billion followup plan to start building out a national network. But the Republican-controlled Congress never provided another dime, and GOP governors like Rick Scott in Florida and Scott Walker in Wisconsin sent their high-speed rail stimulus money back to Washington.

Some of that money was rerouted to dull but largely successful “higher-speed rail” projects to increase speeds between Chicago and St. Louis, Portland and Seattle, and other routes around the country; it also helped relieve some choke points on the heavily traveled Northeast Corridor between Boston and Washington, D.C., where Acela trains hit top speeds of 150 mph. But much of the cash was redirected to California, which at the time had the nation’s only true “high-speed” project after Florida withdrew, with real bullet trains and plans to hit 220 m.p.h. in the flat and empty Central Valley.

It always seemed odd to start a project designed to connect some of California’s most populated places by building tracks in the emptiness of the agricultural Central Valley; the fastest distance between two points doesn’t usually start in the middle. But eight years ago, the project’s then-director, Roelof van Ark, assured me that as long as the state was truly committed to completing the entire 500-mile route, starting in the middle would be less expensive and disruptive than carving up dense urban areas, and would build support for the tougher work ahead. “It makes no sense to start in the Central Valley if we’re not serious about finishing; it’s like designing a moon mission to go a quarter of the way there,” van Ark said. “But if we’re serious, that’s the place to start.”

But it quickly became clear that the quick progress the state had expected in the Central Valley was not going to happen. I went to a raucous town meeting in 2011 in the small farm town of Hanford, where an angry Q-and-A session revealed that residents saw the train as a liberal assault on rural culture, a cosmopolitan Obama plot to help minorities in blighted cities like Fresno and Bakersfield at their expense. John Tos, a fourth-generation fruit-and-nut farmer with six properties in the project’s path, warned that the state would have to kill him to take his land. “You know what it’s called when you take something without permission?” he asked at the meeting. “RAPE!”

From the beginning, the project has been hamstrung by a slew of political, legal, financial and logistical challenges, creating repeated overruns and delays. The federal stimulus provided $3.6 billion to start the project, and California voters approved nearly $10 billion in bonds, but private firms were unwilling to invest without assurances that the entire line would be built. The project’s critics have tied it up in lawsuits, hearings, investigations, administrative challenges and other red tape; Republicans in Washington have passed budget riders preventing it from accessing federal funds; state officials have repeatedly revised the route, and have struggled to negotiate with affected landowners.

The constant headlines over missed deadlines, sketchy ridership studies, and ballooning costs have obscured the original goal of the project, which was to zip passengers between the state’s two most economically important cities in under three hours, with eventual extensions to Sacramento and Anaheim. It was supposed to provide a more convenient and greener alternative to long drives and short flights that would ease congestion on California’s freeways and runways. The California High-Speed Rail Authority has already moved much of State Road 99 to make room for the line, while completing dozens of overpasses, viaducts, grade separations and other construction projects that have put 2,500 Californians to work.

CEO Brian Kelly noted yesterday that Newsom merely prioritized the Central Valley without officiallycancelling the plans to the north and south, which he spun as a step forward. “We welcome this direction and look forward to continuing the important work on this transformative project,” Kelly said in a statement.

Newsom attempted a political dance around the whole issue, taking credit for cutting bait on the project while attempting a victory lap for the part that remained, noting that the work could revitalize an economically downtrodden region with some of the nation’s worst air quality. “This is so much more than a train project,” he tweeted. “It’s a transformation project.” He also framed his move as an act of defiance toward President Donald Trump, noting that if he had fully pulled the plug on the larger project, he would have been forced to return the stimulus money to Washington: “Abandoning high-speed rail means we will have wasted billions of dollars with nothing but broken promises and lawsuits to show for it.” Even Republican state Representative and former Fresno ayor Jim Patterson, a longtime opponent who celebrated Newsom’s move as “the final nail in the coffin of high-speed rail,” said skeptics must now work together with supporters “to make sure we are left with a functional track.”

While Newsom didn’t rule out a revised L.A.-to-San Francisco route, this was an unmistakable derailment for a project that has never enjoyed a smooth ride. “The project can still be achieved,” he said after his speech. “But let’s be honest about the trade-offs and let’s be honest about the cost.”

History suggests this automobile-dependent nation has never been willing to make those trade-offs or pay those costs for high-speed passenger rail. Americans enjoy riding bullet trains in France and Germany and China and Japan, but they seem to consider it an unaffordable luxury at home. It’s exorbitantly expensive to upgrade urban lines like the Northeast Corridor, but it’s hard to justify lines in less densely populated areas—and as the California experience shows, the costs there can escalate, too.

Van Ark, a former European rail executive, warned me back when he was in charge of California’s high-speed rail program in 2011 that its inability to produce quick results could be a fatal flaw. “The big challenge is convincing people this is a long-term project,” he said during an interview in his office in Sacramento. “This can’t be built in one election cycle. We need long-term vision.” Van Ark was supposed to be a booster for the project, but he didn’t sound confident that the U.S. had that kind of vision—or that kind of patience. “Asia has a long-term mentality; Europeans have a medium-term mentality,” he said. “Americans are now, now, now.”

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